I’ve recently seen a lot of posts on Signal vs. Noise concerning the value of being a small company. They especially point out that small companies have the ability to get a personal relationship to their customers. Another point is that people need to stay on top of their game in small companies, otherwise they [...]
The net works in mysterious ways! I just found a Japanese blog that chose to translate my Introducing UCD to XP paper to Japanese. This is too weird!
The whole idea of using personas is to create a specific fictional character, that allows the designers and developers to explore the problem domain. One of Cooper’s points is not to use descriptions of real-life people, as theese do not contain enough aspects to describe all the design-challenges in the problem domain. According to Cooper, [...]
I recently sent a reduced-size paper about combining UCD and XP to a HCI/systems development conference. The first draft I sent out was created in a copy-paste manner from a larger paper, as an approaching deadline of the conference made it impossible for me to rewrite the paper into something that was actually fluent. So [...]
I’m about as much for agile development and free choice of processes as one can be. I’ve spent much time reading up on this topic, as I find it inspiring and generally fun. To get a broader view of the real world, I signed up for a Software Process Improvement (SPI) class at my university [...]
It is my quest and declared goal to remove as much documentation as possible when using personas and scenarios. Something is missing in agile development, and I believe the two UCD methods have much the missing in them that traditional agile development can learn from.
The developers shouldn’t be bothered with piles of documentation – neither [...]
I have before argued that it should be the scenarios that were specific in functionality and not the pesonas. That statement needs elaboration, as scenarios are much more than a list of requirements. If it was only a list of requirements, then why even consider mixing it with iterative development.
Using scenarios is a tool for [...]
There are two ways of approaching the development of new products. The market approach and the product approach.
In the market approach, you listen to the existing and future customers and users to find out how you can make your product appeal to them. Methods of choice in this approach are using focus groups, conducting interviews [...]
When designing software, Allan Cooper suggests designing the entire user interface before development starts with basis in comprehensive field work. The comprehensive field work results in data about the target users in the market segment(s) that the software is intended for. This data is turned into persona decscriptions and scenarios, so that it is possible [...]
Back in 1996 I started a webpage, which later grew into something bigger. I remember the dawning ages of that page, toxboe.net, where I was desperately trying to get traffic sending my link out to hundreds of irrelevant pages. In the recent years I thought back on this action as being quite ridiculous, as these [...]